The comment is referring to finding something to replace the Haber-Bosch Process, which is mostly fossil fuel driven, which makes most of our food itself dependent on fossil fuels.
Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it. I think Pivot Bio is the furthest along in the space - they’ve got a commercially available product - but it’s an active area of development in the industry right now.
> Unrelated to the above, except in the mix of sustainability and agriculture - there are a bunch of companies working on bacteria to fix nitrogen for crops without requiring separate fertilizer similar to how legumes do it.
Nitrogen fixation is energy-intensive, so something has to provide energy. Additionally, nitrogen fixation has to happen in anaerobic conditions, oxygen kills the enzymes responsible for nitrogen fixation. In legumes, the oxygen is carried away by hemoglobin (the same one used in "artificial meat"), but engineering these conditions for free-living bacteria is likely going to be problematic.
I'm personally hoping for a catalyst that can work in mild conditions.
There’s been some success here already - as mentioned, there’s some commercial products on the market already that do some amount of nitrogen fixation for at least corn and I believe wheat as well, so it’s not unsolvable.
